---
title: Run work on a schedule
description: Ask for repeating tasks like hourly digests; Outer registers the schedule and wakes your app each time.
---

Ask for repeating work, like an hourly digest or a nightly cleanup, and your builder writes a schedule file. Outer registers it on deploy and wakes your app at each occurrence.

## Rules worth knowing

- Jobs for one app run one at a time. A slow job delays the next one.
- A failing job retries with backoff, then gives up after 6 failures or at the next occurrence.
- After downtime, Outer runs one missed occurrence and skips the rest. Jobs should tolerate repeats.
- Keep schedules hourly or slower on Free, down to every minute on [Pro](/account/plans).

Long or flaky work should fan out to [Background jobs](/backend/background-jobs).

For the technical detail, your builder reads [Schedule repeating work](/agents/backend/cron).